HELP!

My husband and I would desperately love to relocate to New Zealand. We really feel that we would be good for New Zealand and New Zealand would be good for us. We are young (24/31), in excellent health, and both work in careers on shortage lists. (I have a Bachelors in English, a Masters in Education, a secondary teaching credential, and have been teaching for 4 years. My husband is an IT professional with 12 years of experience; he has MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, CCNP, and Linux certifications.)

We have been trying to find a physician that will take care of the physical clearance but are having some awful trouble finding one that will complete the forms. We've also been having trouble finding any agency that will fingerprint us on the actual Dept. of Justice cards; it seems Livescan fingerprints are only available. Any suggestions or leads?

Do we both have to fill out an EOI and both pay fees? How much can we expect the entire paperwork process to cost? How long will this all take? We'd like to emigrate with Skilled Worker Visas but are beginning to think it would be best to just get to New Zealand and obtain work visas once we are there. Any ideas? We're just feeling overwhelmed, lost, and stifled right now.

HELP!

You will only need to fill out one EOI, however it is probably worth while filling one out with you as the prinipal applicant and one out with your husband as principal applicant (you can do this online, but you onlye need to submit one application eventually)

The reason I say to do this is that your points calculation could work out differently depending on who you put as the principal applicant - you have the qualifications that count, but he has the work experience in a very high demand area. It is difficult so say which would get more points. So fill it out both ways and see which works out better.

You then submit the one EOI, pay one fee, if you get a ITA, you submit that, pay one fee, medicals and xrays you will each need to pay for, if you are sucessful you then pay 2 migrant levies

HELP!

NZIS requires a police certificate, and to obtain one in the states that means having your prints taken on two standard FBI fingerprint cards. You then send these in to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Service in Virginia where they verify if you have any criminal record. If you don't they stamp one of the cards "No Record" and send it back to you. If you have a record then they provide the "rap sheet" to you as is required by law. The problems seems to be, that:

1. They take their sweet time. (The FBI website recommends that if you have an immigration deadline you write that on the envelope you send in, as they are in no hurry to comply with federal laws mandating the release of any investigative records to a citizens) (suprise suprise) :icon_evil:

2. The second problem is that they expect you to obtain the prints on your own from local law enforcement. (Most law enforcement agencies are now using the Livescan system from Identix to print folks for background checks. This system is all digital and sends the e-prints to the FBI and Department of Justice for background check.)

3. US government employees are primarily interested in not "protecting and serving" as their motto goes, but wasting far more energy trying to get out of doing as much work as possible. When I contacted the Department of Justice regarding this they stated: "Your local law enforcement agency is required by law to maintian these FBI print cards on-hand" HA! Local law enforcement angency states "Unless we have a special exemption from the DOJ we are not allowed to use anything but Livescan blah blah blah.

Possible solutions?

1.NZIS could obtain an ORI number that would allow the transmission of digital prints and record checks to be forwarded to them for immigration purposes?

2. You could ink your own fingers up and print yourself on paper and send that to the FBI? (Yeah right)

I wonder what local angencies do when thay have to book and process criminals and their digital Livescan systems go down? I'd be willing to bet they just let the person rot in a holding cell until it comes back online rather than print them the old way (I know they maintain the old equipment on hand as I have worked for law enforcement recently).

HELP!

We just went into the Sherrif's office to get fingerprinted. They had the fingerprint cards (can't remember what they're called). They printed us the old-fashioned way, and were very nice. The fingerprinting cost us $12 each (cash, perhaps), and the FBI wanted an additional $18 (certified check or money order). Do send in your police check request in promptly; ours took about 3 months to come back.

Did you mean that you couldn't find a physician to fill out the Medical Certificate? That's wierd, if so. Much of it you have to fill out, and the doc's part is so easy.

If your work experience is in one of the shortage lists, you could be fast-tracked, especially if one of you has a job offer. It's hard to say with certainty how long it will take, though. So far, the longest stage for us was collecting all the paperwork to submit with out application. That was just under the limit at 3 1/2 months. Currently we're waiting to have a case worker assigned (estimated 3 months), but part of that is because we've got other things happening in our lives, and won't start looking for work until about January.

Good luck!

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, mid-1800s